Conclusion

Summary

This book has demonstrated how Christian liturgy and theology were entangled within a complex religious, political, and environmental ecology in Byzantine Constantinople. It has also shown how responses to earthquakes in Constantinople provide an exceptional window into the ways in which early Byzantines conceived of the natural world. Here I summarize the book’s conclusions.

Constantinople was a society marked by grand ritual systems that shaped its residents’ view of the kosmos and history. In ecclesiastical and civic rites, Constantinople projected an image of an ordered kosmos and a similarly ordered state that reflected it. Earthquakes, to the extent that they threatened these images of cosmic and political order, did not fit comfortably in the city’s political and ecclesiastical ritual systems but for different reasons: they threatened both the patristic notion of a harmonious kosmos and the Roman ideology of eternal victory.